Downsizing the front page

Posts: 6066

As we all have noticed, the front page loads pretty slow lately and we could even be loosing new members because they get timed out. I have to reduce the size of the front page in order to keep things running smooth around here. I might have to reduce the amount of banners on the affiliate tower to reduce the space. I also have companies that want to have their banner on the front page. I have turned them away for some time now because there is not enough room. I may have to limit that space to 5-10 banners.

Just trying to keep you guys informed with what is going on here.

-Jamie

Posts: 3008

thanks

Posts: 3295

What causes this slow loading?
Is it only a dial-up issue? The front page refreshes in under 5 seconds for me (on cable).

Posts: 6066

Dreamhost tells me that the front page has more than 1meg on it. They say it should only have about half of that. I have dsl and sometimes going to buggynews.com can take up to a minute to load. I know it is not my computer. I have tried several and other people are noticing it too.

Posts: 856

I've been having the same problem, thought it was my
comp.

Posts: 3295

As Admin do you have a File Manager utility where you can look at the file sizes & see what's taking up space? The banners look like they're little low-res icons but if they're actually large photos displayed small, it could save some bandwidth to resize all of them.

How much of a resource hog is the recent post scroll? I don't know how others feel but since that was changed to include Section, Topic, Author, Date & Time it takes too long to cycle and I don't use it anymore. It used to be my 1st stop at BN whenever I visited.

Posts: 6066

Here is what is going on with the front page. A little breakdown.

7.2K 1 HTML/Text
3.5K 2 IFrames
101.4K 1 Flash Object
29.5K 7 JavaScript Files
9.8K 1 Stylesheet File
923.4K 26 Images
1075.1K Total size
38 HTTP requests

There seems to be over 1MB in files on the page. Any site that is above about 200Kb in size will likely have somewhat slow loading. I would suggest optimizing image sizes on the page to greatly improve loading speeds. As well the use of Javascript can also slow down the sites loading as that needs to be execute on the client side.

Posts: 544

i have fios and a macbook air and it loads in about 30 to 40 seconds take you guess

Posts: 2209

The average size of the 26 images is ~36k/image. That's not much but it does take some time to load (~27 seconds on my Comcast Cable). It may simply be a combination of things. One of the areas that I was thinking about was the number of inherented ads that are placed on by the hosting company.

Did Steve or anyone else for that matter, look at having it hosted with NO inhereted ads? I know the monthly fee would be higher but it may be worth it as the space freed up could be offset with additional or larger sponsership.

Just something to look at...

If you'd like to discuss the financial side offline you can PM me. We can walk through all the financial aspects of the site. I'm not interested in the micro-details I just want to help where I can.

Posts: 6066